User-created stickers on Line have racked up $12 million in sales over the first three months

The cutesy stickers that messaging app Line is famous for are not just popular — they help to rake in the money. After all, Line makes over $10 million a month just from selling stickers.

Line further rode on the potential of stickers by opening a marketplace in April that lets anyone create and sell their own stickers, with sales starting on May 8. Today it announced that the Line Creators Market has drawn over 149,000 creators from 124 different countries, who have submitted 30,000 stickers, of which 10,000 sets are currently on sale as of August 19.

What’s impressive is that 12.41 million sticker sets have been sold so far, bringing in sales of over 1.23 billion yen ($11.9 million). That’s in just three months and despite rather limited availability — as stickers from the Creators Market can only be bought in countries where the Line Web Store is operational.

In June, Line widened the reach of such user-made stickers by launching its Web store in nine more countries, including the US and the UK. It appears that Korea has been added to the list recently as well, making up a total of 14 regions where the store is available.

Creators who use the market can sell sets of 40 stickers at 100 yen (about $1) per set once the graphics are approved by Line, and they will receive 50 percent of the proceeds.

Line noted that more than half of all sticker sets have brought in sales of 10,000 yen ($97) or more, which it says “shows that more than just a few very popular sets make money and that creators can reasonably expect to make a little extra spending money with their own stickers.”

The latest figures underlie the importance of stickers to Line, which arguably pioneered the concept, and has now kicked off the idea of democratizing stickers on its platform in a bid to accelerate Line’s global expansion with further localization. The company says the total number of Line stickers sent and received in one day has reached a high of more than 1.8 billion.